I suppose that one of my assumptions, that people of other religions aren’t affected by the god of some other religion, is faulty if you don’t mention what kind of god you’re talking about. As they didn’t in the study. But i do wonder what kind of result they would get if instead of using the generic terms for spirituality that they did, they primed with words like “christian” “jesus” “muhammed” etc. Words that are intended to be positive, but which also have different meanings in different populations. I’m pretty sure that the result would be (drastically) different.

I agree wholeheartedly though: all that this does is shows that there are techniques that work well at getting at the real effect religion has on people, and that we should really use them.

Also, this is a very small study. More research clearly needs to be done.

But I do like your headline! I was trying to be diplomatic with mine. The title for the journal article itself is even worse: “God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game.”